TeachMeet06

Learn something new, be amazed, amused and enthused. This is an informal gathering of those curious about technologies.

Anyone can share cool ideas they have or great ideas they’ve triallled in their classrooms. Join us in person or via Skype.

We want things that have succeeded and which have failed. Whatever it takes to further the knowledge of the education community.

technorati tags teachmeet06

For the aforementioned TeachMeet06 I noticed that Ewan is using teachmeet06 as a tag on flickr photos tagged with teachmeet06. Gordon is tagging his blog posts teachmeet06 so here is a wee aggregation: tagged with teachmeet06 which will pick up del.icio.us tags too. If you are blogging about TeachMeet please join in the fun.

technorati tags teachmeet06

I’ve tried lots of ways to read and keep up with blogs, I mostly use Vienna a desktop aggregator at the moment because it is free and has appleScript support, which allows some simple recycling of information (example).

I’ve tried netvibes, suprglu, home portals and a host of others.

But the one I really like is lilina: this example gives me the postings from 30 odd Scots Edu Blogs sorted by date, I know a few of the other solutions are supposed to do this, but they do not seem to get it quite right, bunching posts from one blog together rather than splitting them mixing them with the others and time sorting them.

The example is a bit slow, but it is running of a machine in my house which is a fairly amateurish setup. It is also missing all the edublogs.org blogs as edublogs.org was having a bit of trouble with bloglines yesterday, ironically this problem was caused by bloglines. I’ll add them later if this looks like being useful.

Hopefully Scots Edu Blog Daily lilina might mature into a useful Scot-Edu-blog tool.

Ewan’s Post pointing to Stephen Heppell’s idea for school TV got me thinking about video blogging. I’ve also had some problems with quicktime files on the site (due to my lazy linking straight to the media). so I’ve been looking for some vblog code and found embedthevideo.com which seems to do the trick, click on the image to play the movie in a new window or direct link. I’ve updated the Glencoe Movies page to use this code and guess I should do the Dream Dragon if I have time.

I’d appreciate comments if this doesn’t work for anyone. The movie is on archive.org so is slower than the Glencoe Movies.

click here to download

Via Tim Lauer zohoshow is a new addition to the Zoho Office Suite. An nnline tool to create, edit, publish, and show presentations.

I had a quick try redoing the first few slides from an old presentation: Weblogging and Podcasting at Sandaig a S5 Slide Show to Weblogging and Podcasting at Sandaig (ZoHo Show). The process seems quite simple, not as powerful as S5, but another handy addition to the Web 2.0 toolset.

I don’t present much, but on the last couple of occasions, I’ve just used Safari with a load of tabs open, a couple of local pages for the intro and outro slides. If you are talking and showing examples of blogs, pods etc, this seems agood enough way to do it.

powered by performancing firefox

Draft MOODLE Course on Blogging from Andy in Aberdeen.I was delighted that Sandaig got some link love, but apart from that this looks like a great intro to blogging for Scottish(or elsewhere) teachers.This is a step by step guide to educational blogging using mainly Scottish examples.The steps are set out in a clear and well ordered way that would allow any teacher to get the idea of educational blogging and get started blogging.In andy’s hands Moodle looks like a great tool for online cpd.

powered by performancing firefox

That last post was just to show the Heads of the primary schools in our learning community how easy it is to blog. The poor souls listened to me for about 90 minutes and the upshot is we are going to try setting up blogs for the other 5 primaries in the Bannerman New Learning Community for next session.

I am quite excited about this, I hope to set the sites up over the summer and then do some cpd with my colleagues next session.

I’ve got a few ideas about using the blogs that I’ve not inflicted on them yet, I’ll wait until the blog bug has taken hold.

David Warlick’s tool for collecting photos, postings etc about conferences.

Like my eLive 2006 RSS experiment on steroids.

powered by performancing firefox

As the final term of the session slides into sports days and clearing up we are doing a couple of interesting things at Sandaig.

The recent romans podcast is Educate’s podcasting directory’s featured podcast.

As mentioned below I started a World Cup 2006 blog. If you have a minute, please give the blog a comment.

It has been hard for the children to get time to post much, as we are busy with filming The Dream Dragon. Based on the Keepers poem for National Poetry Day October 2005 written by Sandaig children and turned into a play by Carol Fuller, an American high school theatre teacher in Austell, Georgia in the southern United States of America and pupils at South Cobb high school.

The production is pretty lo-fi, no costumes or scenery, only a few props. Focusing on the performances and how to stage it. The children are shooting the video taking turns at being cameraperson, director and gofor.

They have come up with some pretty imaginative suggestions for how to frame and stage scenes. I’ve uploaded quicktime movies of Scenes 2 to 7 to the internet archive, these are linked from the The Dream Dragon blog.

This whole project has lasted most of this session (and it might not be over yet),

sparked by The Keepers Poetry Project which was based on a poem by Phil Whitehead and run by Peter Ford our poems were original published on the Sandaig Poets blog and podcast on Radio Sandaig.

This was blogged by Ewan McIntosh and spread via Anne Davis, who was Spellbound by a Podcast.

It was then picked up by Carol Fuller from Ewan’s blog , her students wrote a play based on the verses. Carol has also become a frequent commentator on Sandaig Poets producing some wonderful conversations. I have a lot more to say about this whole process, but for now i need to thank the poets, blog magicians and fairy blog-mother Carol for everything.